- Justine Hunter writes about the litigation expected to follow from the Cons' rubber-stamp for the Northern Gateway pipeline.

- Sheila Pratt reports that 75 officers from Alberta's already non-functional environmental regulator have been lured into an industry-funded group doesn't offer much reason for confidence that public interests are going to be represented any better in the near future. And Douglas Fischer takes a look at the massive amounts of private money being used to fund climate denialism with less and less donor transparency.

- Michael Byers critiques the Cons' obsession with the North Pole. And Matthew Fisher writes that the Cons' posturing has taken away from efforts to present a sound scientific position - which may result on Canada losing out on claims it might otherwise have been able to win.

- Finally, Joel Harden reviews Brad Lavigne's Building the Orange Wave - and it's well worth noting his take on what's often left out of Lavigne's otherwise strong account:

This, as some have said, wasn’t the NDP our grandparents built. Gone
were any pretensions to socialism in the party’s constitution. Absent
were genuine efforts to row against the tide of established thinking.

Present instead was "social-ism," an approach Tony Blair championed (using the ideas of Anthony Giddens)
to move the British Labour Party "beyond left and right." Layton’s
adoption of this mantra involved repeated claims to make "Parliament
work for people."

Lavigne claims the party did this at several crucial moments: during budget wrangles with Liberals in 2004 and 2005, and the parliamentary dispute of 2008-2009. I’ll leave it to others to debate the merits of those claims.

My issue is with Lavigne's view that the NDP’s rise came from a shift
"beyond politics," and embrace of populist messaging, neither of which
rings true for me. Lavigne’s focus on high-level strategy undermines his
assessment of Layton’s strengths, and why many activists and movements
held him in such high regard.

For me, the Orange Wave started with Layton’s courting of Quebec voters and reputation as an activist politician.

Unlike most NDP leaders, he didn’t antagonize Quebec on
constitutional questions, was proudly green and opposed to war in
Afghanistan. This made the NDP, as Lavigne explains, a magnet for public
animosity in Quebec against Harper, and a rallying point for those
seeking to oust him.
...
There’s a real difference between strategy to seek a political vision,
and strategy as a political vision -- we need more of the former and
less of the latter.

As Lavigne notes, the Conservatives have built a solid infrastructure
to communicate their ideas and mobilize grassroots supporters. A recent study insists that
the left needs a similar infrastructure to challenge corporate power
and its dissemination of fend-for-yourself, neoliberal ideas.
Strategists like Lavigne have an important role to play in that process,
but not without the energy, and commitment, of social movements.